Software defines the pace of innovation, and that means all organizations face the same imperative: deliver better, more secure code faster while spending less. Success in this digital transformation journey is rapidly becoming the dividing line between market leaders and their competitors, requiring organizations to fundamentally rethink how they develop, secure, and deploy software.
The answer lies in value stream management — a proven approach that accelerates time to market, eliminates common obstacles like handoffs and broken feedback loops, and provides the visibility leaders need to ensure high-quality customer experiences.
Why value stream management?
Over the past year, I’ve participated in more than 10 executive round tables, spoken to countless customers from around the world, and taken input from organizations such as the DevOps Institute and the Value Stream Management Consortium.
I’ve noticed a common theme when discussing transformation goals with industry leaders. They recognize their organization can’t stop at becoming a software company — they need to be a high-performing one.
While it’s no small task to align business objectives with IT work, accelerate the software delivery process, and improve software quality, there are four key tenets organizations can follow to propel their digital transformation journeys while creating more business value with fewer resources:
- Make developers more productive: Improve developer experience to more effectively recruit and retain tech talent and make developers more productive so they ship better software faster.
- Measure productivity and efficiency: Measure impact across the software delivery lifecycle to improve operational efficiency.
- Secure the software supply chain: Reduce security and compliance risk.
- Accelerate cloud migration: Move to the cloud with the right security controls in place to minimize risk.
Successfully implementing these tenets requires a structured approach that connects people, processes, and technology. Value stream management provides this framework, offering a proven roadmap that helps organizations systematically transform how they deliver software. The Value Stream Management Consortium has developed this implementation path into nine key stages: Go, Assess, Vision, Identify, Organize, Map, Connect, Inspect, and Adapt.
Implementing value stream management
A critical step early in the roadmap is defining the Vision, which sets the parameters for inspecting value streams. It’s key that the business outcomes drive the vision. For example, if an organization’s vision is to be the first to market with a new product, speed of delivery is an important factor. However, if customer satisfaction and service reliability are the most essential elements, quality metrics will be at the top of the list.
Once you’ve identified the vision, the remaining steps in the roadmap ensure you have the people, process, and technology in place to support the vision:
- The Identify and Organize stages are about the people. Organizations should visually represent the human aspect of these phases in a value stream reference architecture.
- The Map stage is about bringing together the correct people with a lean and efficient process.
- The Connect stage is about enabling technology that automates the process and simplifies operations for cross-functional teams, reducing cognitive load, improving quality and security, and enabling faster value delivery.
- Finally, the organization can then Inspect and Adapt their software value streams for optimization, continuously and in real time.
This roadmap ensures that individuals are connected to the technology and equipped to utilize it effectively. Value stream discovery also plays a crucial role in mapping individuals and teams into a workflow strategically designed to enhance the developer and user experience.
A platform approach is essential for successful implementation. According to Gartner’s Market Guide for DevOps Value Stream Delivery Platforms, value stream delivery platforms provide fully integrated capabilities that enable continuous delivery of software. These capabilities include planning, version control, continuous integration, test automation, release orchestration, continuous deployment and rollback monitoring, security testing, and analyzing value stream metrics. Value stream delivery platforms integrate with infrastructure and compliance automation tools to automate infrastructure deployment and policy enforcement.
Measuring success with value stream metrics
There are two types of metrics in value stream management: flow and realization.
Value flow metrics define how we deliver software, from ideation through realization. These metrics measure the flow of business value, including insight into the efficiency, quality, and speed at which software progresses through the entire value stream. By understanding value flow metrics, organizations can identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
DORA metrics are a subset of flow metrics. DORA metrics provide a quantitative measure of performance and include:
- Deployment Frequency: How often an organization deploys code to production. A higher deployment frequency indicates that the development team can deliver changes more rapidly, which reflects a more agile and efficient software development process.
- Lead Time for Changes: The time it takes for a code change to go from commit to deploy. A shorter lead time signifies that the team efficiently converts ideas into actual deployments, allowing for quicker delivery of features or fixes to customers.
- Time to Restore Service: How long it takes to recover from a service failure and restore normal operations. A lower time to restore service indicates a more resilient system and a capable response team, minimizing downtime and enhancing user experience.
- Change Failure Rate: The percentage of changes that result in a service degradation, including incidents, bugs, or any changes that necessitate a rollback. Lowering the change failure rate reflects improved quality in code changes and builds greater confidence in the development process.
When analyzed in combination with metrics such as issue resolution lead time, cycle time, new issues, and deployments, these metrics offer a holistic view of the value stream’s efficiency. Using these measures wisely and in combination is important for identifying areas for improvement across the software development lifecycle.
Value realization metrics measure tangible outcomes of delivery efforts. While traditional measures like revenue, sales, and profit margins provide financial insights, other key indicators such as net promoter scores and customer journey time capture equally important dimensions of realized value. While these lagging metrics reflect past performance, leading indicators like visitor traffic, customer reviews, and conversion rates offer valuable predictions of future success.
Putting value stream discovery to work
Metrics and inspection come together with value stream discovery, which looks at an organization’s current and desired future state in the context of its technology value stream — the amount of time and resources required to move from idea and requirements to deployment and customer value. Value stream discovery also establishes a baseline to measure software delivery performance progress and identify the touchpoints in the process that don’t add value for the customer or the business. The outputs from value stream discovery allow the organization to configure a lean setup for a DevSecOps toolchain more easily.
A unified platform is essential for achieving the envisioned future state while catering to developers' and customers' needs. This systematic approach fosters transparency — essential for effective value stream inspections — and underscores the significance of applying metrics to assess and understand the current state. Value stream discovery is pivotal for comprehensively mapping processes, personas, tools, interactions, and measurements into a singular view.
Software defines the pace of innovation
When we examine the rationale behind inspecting software development value streams, it becomes clear that visibility is key to understanding how and what organizations deliver. Having the right metrics in place ensures that organizations can see how their software delivery is progressing, where bottlenecks and inefficiencies exist, and how to adapt for continuous improvement. Implementing an end-to-end DevSecOps platform combined with value stream discovery techniques equips organizations to continuously refine and enhance their delivery processes, accelerating innovation and paving the way for long-term success.
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